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pace. Thus, we arrived just as a kiln had been loaded and contained
its preheating fire in preparation for full firing the following morning.
We began with the firing of a kiln load of pottery, and then proceeded
in succeeding days to film the making of the next kiln load. By the
time the filming sessions were almost complete, the kiln load which
had been fired on the first day was cool enough to be unloaded. Thus,
all of the pottery which is seen in production throughout the film is not
the pottery unloaded at the end of the film.
We conducted interviews on-camera and off-camera during rest
periods each day when the potters temporarily suspended work in the
ware shop or around the yard. We carried out additional interviews in
the house each evening. The bulk of the interview sessions, beyond
this, took place during the February 13, 1967, visit with the Meaderses
and during an extended field trip, conducted July 28-August 3, 1968,
with Robert Sayers, then an undergraduate summer intern at the
Smithsonian Folklife Office.
No process in the film was artificially staged or recreated. No
process or implement was revived. No equipment used in the film had
been retired earlier in favor of newer equipment and then brought
back in the interest of showing an earlier form of technology. Lanier,
working on his own, would have ground his clay in his self-styled
electric pug mill instead of with a mule, but Cheever hewed close to
familiar ways:
I'm used to grinding them with a mule. . . I never done nothing else. I
just like it. It ain't as fast as grinding it with a machine, but I don't care
anything about hurrying anymore. Gonna take my time from here out.
On Thanksgiving Day 1967, six months after filming, Cheever
died. He had developed a modest local reputation as a fellow with
whom one could visit and talk over problems, and he was well loved
in the area. A neighbor commented on his passing, "It was as if a great
tree had fallen." Beyond Cheever's considerable charm and personal
generosity, he served as a veritable catalogue of potter's know-how.
Had we delayed the filming of his kiln site, we would have missed
sorely the decisive contributions which he made, and the significance
of a metaphor familiar amongst ethnographic filmmakers would have
been driven home:
"Chaque fois qu'un vieillard meurt en Afrique, c'est la bibliotheque
d'Alexandrie que brule." ("Each time an elder dies in Africa, it is the
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